Month: March 2017

Palmer Luckey is out at Facebook. The Oculus co-founder, who helped kickstart the recent VR craze with a prototype headset built out of his parents’ garage, has left the company after a year that heralded the launch of the consumer Oculus Rift but also a number of lawsuits and a pro-Trump meme scandal. Read More

Facebook will reveal at its F8 conference a new class of group bots that work inside Messenger group chats. These group bots can keep users informed about real-time news such as a sports game’s progress, e-commerce deliveries and more. Read More

In its biggest change in a decade, Facebook is evolving from text and link-focused sharing to the visual communication format it admits “Snapchat has really pioneered.” Starting today, all users will soon have access to the new Facebook Camera feature that lets them overlay special effects on photos and videos. They can then share this content to a Snapchat clone called Facebook… Read More

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants the company to own the future of virtual reality, and in the short term that means putting a lot of VR headsets on a lot of faces. To do so, the company is hiring Michael Hillman, a 15-year veteran of Apple, to lead the VR product roadmap for Oculus as head of VR hardware. Read More

After years of stubborn caution, Facebook is finally embracing the animated GIF. Next week Facebook will begin testing a GIF button that lets users post GIFs from services like Giphy and Tenor as comments, a source told TechCrunch. We inquired with Facebook, which confirmed the GIF test is coming with this statement: “Everyone loves a good GIF and we know that people want to be able to… Read More

Zenreach is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series C funding. Founder and CEO Jack Abraham said that Zenreach is “bringing the online and offline world together.” Specifically, businesses that use Zenreach can offer their customers free Wi-Fi. All the customer needs to do is register using their email address, phone number or Facebook account. Read More

Facebook is testing an enhanced local search feature that could see the social network creeping in on Google Maps, Foursquare and Yelp territory, TechCrunch learned and Facebook confirmed. Facebook users are now able to surface recommendations of nearby places – like “dinner nearby” or “bars nearby,” for example – by entering a query in… Read More

Reddit has been trying to make its site more accessible to a wider pool of users, and today the company is planning to show off one of the ways it plans to do that: by making the service a little bit more like Facebook and Twitter. Read More

One of the unique things about Instagram Live is that the video has always been disappearing. After your live stream is over the content is deleted forever – unlike Facebook Live or Periscope which save your video so audiences can view it after the fact. Until now. The company just announced that broadcasters will have the option to save live videos to their phone after they… Read More

ark Zuckerberg is displeased. It’s been more than four months since election night, but Facebook still finds itself in the hot seat over the spread of fake news on the platform, and what role (if any) it played in the election. Read More